


Darling, Believe Me (Things Stay the Same)

by sirenalley



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-13
Updated: 2012-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:11:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirenalley/pseuds/sirenalley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Mockingjay AU. She has lost everyone, and it never gets any easier, and nothing ever changes. He's there to mirror her misery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darling, Believe Me (Things Stay the Same)

 

The hovercraft deposits them separately, the ground a still, solid thing beneath her feet. There is sunlight on her skin—a real wash of warmth on pores glazed with cold sweat. It falls in bright golden streamers across what remains of District 12. The image is unfairly beautiful, unjustly serene.  
  
It belies the true destruction buried below every broken beam, every ash pile. What used to be homes, lives, people.  
  
Katniss is sick with something that crawls in her stomach by the time she reaches the Victor’s Village down the lane. The house remains untouched. A pillar of emptiness and loneliness which welcomes as only a shell can do. But she can’t fill it the way it should be filled, with people, with a family of three.  
  
She pays no attention to the footsteps that follow behind her, heavy and measured in a way they won’t be for long with alcohol close at hand.  
  
Haymitch says nothing to her, no goodbye; he immediately retreats to his own solitude. It’s a joke, these homes gifted to them. They’re presents of isolation. To hide the victors, seclude them to their own nightmares. To separate them from the rest of the town so they may never know normalcy again, so they may never escape.  
  
She knew that then, she knows it now—only it feels twice redoubled, the isolation. Maybe because there’s no one left in District 12 but them. There’s no one to hide from, but she doesn’t care, she wants to hide anyway.  
  
A fresh wave of grief comes with the closed door and Katniss collapses in the foyer, her heart wrenched up high in her chest, in her closed throat and she can’t breathe. It feels like dying. Her sobs take on a wailing of their own, ripped from every tender corner of her body until there’s nothing left but wet salt and swollen eyes and a pounding headache.  
  
Katniss drags herself into the bedroom, fully dressed, curls under cold sheets that scratch her healing burns. Her belt presses like a brand into her sore and empty stomach. She cries more, then, until exhaustion drowns into the black pitch of nightmares.  
  
Months go like this. The phone rings its lonely, shrill sound on the wall but she never answers it. Greasy Sae comes and goes, like some phantom Katniss never fully registers.  
  
She dreams of Prim every night. Prim on fire, Prim a grasp too distant to reach. She was right there, right there, _screaming_.  
  
And Peeta, who she never saw alive again. A victim of the street violence of that last fighting day, his muddled reality unable to lead him through it.  
  
And Gale. A bullet to the head from a Peacekeeper after they took him away.  
  
Katniss wakes up and she’s still screaming, fishing in the darkness for light that doesn’t exist.  
  


 

 

Half a year later and the world is dimming to wintertime. Six months Katniss Evendeen has spent barely aware of life, of her surroundings, of Greasy Sae dressing and feeding this husk of a person.  
  
The phone rarely rings.  
  
Katniss leaves the house in the mornings to walk through District 12, wearing clothes unsuited for the cold winds of November, boots unlaced and flaps parted open to chill her ankles. The stragglers from District 13 have returned home, those who wished to, and are meagerly rebuilding what they have lost. It looks closer to what she remembers yet nowhere near a recreation.  
  
If this place will ever be the same; she wonders.  
  
She finds him in an area structured to resemble the Hob, if only for its purposes of selling and trading. Panem is healing slow and steady and the flow of food through District 12 exists primarily here in this open market, through more legal means than it used to. She can’t help a burning nostalgia, an ache to recognize and be recognized, but no one says anything as she passes.  
  
Haymitch has his hands on two bottles of white liquor at a vendor and he looks at her from the corners of his eyes, his expression sealed and unreadable.  
  
Anger and resentment bloom deep in her bones, to Katniss’ surprise, a recalling of their differences ever since she was brought to District 13. And now, he is here, Peeta is not. The fact stokes a spiteful fire.  
  
Haymitch is only sober because the morning is just getting on and he hasn’t had a chance to drown the daylight hours out. He ignores her like everyone else and turns away, bottles in his fingers, swinging slightly at his thighs when he brushes by.  
  
The fire of betrayal doesn’t last long. Subdued by that perennial tinge of depression as soon as Haymitch is out of sight, Katniss remains standing alone in the cold morning. It’s like he was never there at all.  
  
Eventually she moves again, and as if possessed, purchases a bottle of liquor from the same vendor. She doesn’t know the man who carries out the transaction (Ripper is dead now, too) but she can feel the weight of his gaze, careful and searching. He knows her, everyone does, and that’s all that matters. There is nothing thinly concealed about his judgment.  
  
Katniss doesn’t touch the bottle until a week later. It’s snowing, wisps of snowflakes that cake on the sills and cloud the air when she breathes. Buttercup has taken to circling the yard and mewling, as lost in the bitter sting of despair as her; it’s something she doesn’t think either of them will ever recover from.  
  
And on that day she realizes the direction she’s headed. It dawns on her when her eyes carry across the lawn and pick out Haymitch’s dark windows.  
  
Somewhere behind her, Greasy Sae calls her inside.  
  
She goes and finds the liquor under her bed, its contents sloshing around the glass bottle as she hurries, out the back door, across the white yard, to that house.  
  
Her voice scrapes out of her throat and then she’s yelling and it’s the first she can remember speaking in a long time.  
  
“Haymitch!”  
  
Silence rings back.  
  
Her shoes leave clear prints in the snow when she advances on the front door, kicking it viciously, banging one fisted hand. It immediately saps her strength; Katniss ends up leaning all her weight on the wooden frame and screaming through it.  
  
“ _Haymitch_ , open up!”  
  
When he doesn’t, Katniss surprises herself by circling around the house, retrieving an icy stone from the ground and shattering one of the windows into the lower level. She’s set to climb up with her hands on the sill among the broken shards when Haymitch’s curses resound from somewhere inside.  
  
“If you’re thinking about crawling through there, sweetheart, you might as well be prepared to break your neck.”  
  
He sounds drunk, speech slurring, but an undertone of aggravation exists there. She picks up on it and wants to chuck the liquor bottle at his head so _that_ shatters, too.  
  
“I don’t care,” she says gruffly, voice hoarse with disuse, clearing away the glass with a few angry swipes. Her palms are already slick with blood, fingers dripping. Katniss plants her foot on the wall to heft her weight up when Haymitch appears, his hands grasping under her arms to pull her through the rest of the way. She immediately kicks free of his hold, like some wild thrashing animal, and this time she does throw the bottle at him. Haymitch dodges, glass fracturing in a spray of tiny glittering pieces, liquor splashing all over the floor.  
  
Unsurprisingly, the broken bottle barely makes a dent in the filth and grime and trash of the rest of the house. She doesn’t even wrinkle her nose at it.  
  
“Should I have expected an assault?” he drawls, but still seems wary.  
  
“Don’t even ask that,” she spits. And then just stands there, glaring at him, wanting to break down and cry at the same time she wants to scream accusations. “You just ignored me. The last six months, you were pretending I didn’t even exist. Like I was already dead.”  
  
Haymitch doesn’t answer. Then he turns away, crossing the perilous glass-scattered carpet to collapse on a chair in the living room. She notices the knife in his fist for the first time.  
  
“You wanted to be, didn’t you?” he ventures, retrieving his own intact bottle from the floor and stealing a swig. No doubt to blur this moment so he doesn’t have to face it head-on. “You killed Coin because you expected them to kill you for it. And then you tried to kill yourself. And after all that failed, you’re still looking for a quick way out. Well, why not now? You’ve plenty of opportunity left.”  
  
“You have no right,” she chokes, her eyes already burning. She hadn’t known a person could cry as much as she cries these days. “Why shouldn’t I—I protected no one. They’re all _gone_. Peeta’s dead, Haymitch. He died because of me. He died because of _you_.”  
  
Her real reason for being here finally announces itself with that statement. Haymitch’s dark eyes lift and linger on her, flat and grim. “He died because of the Capitol.”  
  
“I can’t believe you.” Katniss crosses the room, boots crunching on the carpet. “I can’t _believe_ that’s all you have to say.” The deadness she’s felt for months translates into pure fury, and her fists swing for real this time, trying to shove Haymitch off the chair he’s seated on. He drops the knife—something she notices, sneers at—and catches her wrists, twisting them in a deadlock. Then he slams her into the wall behind her and it’s like being at the Training Center all over again.  
  
She knees him in the stomach, twisting out of his grip, slippery and lethal. She’s learned some things, being in the Games twice, being in a war. He’s rusty, despite his own flavor of brutality. And he isn’t trying to kill her. Katniss, on the other hand, isn’t sure what she’s doing.  
  
She scoops up the knife he abandoned and throws it at him, and it’s like being on the train all over again, or in the arena, faced off against a Career—these moments just repeat themselves at an impossible crescendo of violence until one of them is dead. Until all of them are dead. But they’re both alive by the time Haymitch stumbles back with the knife embedded in his shoulder and blood soaking his sleeve.  
  
“Get out,” he growls, ripping the blade from his bicep and covering the wound. “And clean your hands.” She looks at the bloody handprints she’s left on him, then at his shoulder. He’s drunk enough that maybe it doesn’t hurt all that much. But Katniss suspects he’s too used to injuries to think much of it, knowing it won’t kill him. She wonders if she wishes it would.  
  
By the time she stumbles through the snow back to the house, collapsing twice on her knees and shaking the whole way, Katniss has her answer.  
  
She doesn’t want Haymitch dead. He’s the last person in the world she has left, after all.  
  
But it doesn’t matter, and Katniss curls up on the floor of her room as the snow melts into water on her feverish skin. Her sobs wrack her body and her hands find the carpet, grasping, leaving red smears on everything she touches.  
  


 

 

One afternoon, late winter, Katniss slips into the woods. The gate is never electrified anymore and there are no laws against hunting game, but no one ventures past it, likely because they have no reason to. They have food, shelter, and freedom. Peace.  
  
They need nothing else.  
  
Katniss takes her bow but doesn’t use it. It feels familiar in her hands, worn and loose, as deadly as ever. She doesn’t know where she means to go, but her feet take her to the outcropping of rock she used to sit beside Gale on. Memories of that cool morning before the reaping resurface as if they were there all along, below the skin, waiting to remind her.  
  
She thinks of every trap, every snare, every explosive Gale ever made and what they did in the end, whose lives they ended, man and beast alike. She thinks of Gale. The boy who became a man at her side in the woods, who smelled of pine needles and had a family like her to look after.  
  
“We should have left,” she says to the icy rock, bare fingers sliding across it, cold underneath her unfeeling touch. “You said that once, too. Gale… I don’t know. I don’t think I’m strong enough for this.”  
  
A quiet wind shakes the naked branches of the trees around her, the sky slate-gray, everything else white and black.  
  
“I forgive you.” Katniss barely manages the words, her throat closing, making it difficult to swallow. “For everything.”  
  
 _I just wish you were here to know it._  
  
“And I miss you.”  
  
It doesn’t feel like enough. No one is listening to Katniss out here, removed from the rest of the world by degrees of separation; now she’s so far away she doesn’t even recognize herself the way she used to be. She looks back on that person before and considers them naïve, spirited, reckless. There’s so much more she knows now. Like how difficult it is to keep the ones who are important to you alive when you bite the fist that feeds. But she’s been cast off, a charred remnant of a mascot once great, powerful, moving, effective. A Mockingjay without its wings, stripped of its voice.  
  
Katniss dreams vividly that night of fire and a chasm of darkness below, and the moment she sees her best friend for the very last time, screaming _Shoot me_ too late.

 

 

  
Spring comes quick, nearly overnight, colors blooming across green grass and birds livening the sky with music. Katniss doesn’t feel any better but she leaves her bedroom on her own and is nearly to the point of being able to feed herself, so Greasy Sae shows up less and stays for shorter periods of time. The seclusion becomes too much (she hadn’t realized how much she depended on the nearby heartbeat of another person), and the house seems to consume itself with silence, too massive and too empty for Katniss to handle.  
  
She seeks out Haymitch on her own again, knocking with her knuckles, grinding her teeth.  
  
“Well, that’s an improvement from all that kicking and screaming before,” he says when he lets her in.  
  
“I’m not sorry about your shoulder.”  
  
“Of course you aren’t.”  
  
They never talk much. They were never talkers; it was always Peeta who filled the quiet with his own friendly chatter, his way around words and his easy charisma that kept them together. She suddenly aches for him in a way that’s as fresh as the first day. Katniss keeps his pearl under her pillow at night, though it does nothing to combat the nightmares, not the way the weight of his arms around her could.  
  
Haymitch is poor company, but there’s an understanding between them Katniss finds nowhere else, can ask of no one else.  
  
Haymitch, after all, is the only one who knows what this feels like.  
  
She steals swallows from his bottles sometimes, but it isn’t until one late night when she can’t find Buttercup and Greasy Sae leaves before dark that she gets drunk on the alcohol. Usually Haymitch is monitoring, but he’s often too drunk on his own to pay any attention.  
  
She remembers what this is like, dizzy on her feet and the world out of focus, out of her grasp, and she wonders why Haymitch wants this feeling so badly. Except that it pushes reality away for a while, Katniss hates the loss of control.  
  
“Does it ever stop?” she asks that night, slumping at the kitchen table littered with dirty plates.  
  
“Stop what? The spinning? Not until you throw it back up in the morning.”  
  
“Hurting.” Haymitch looks at her when she says it. “Does it ever go away, I mean.”  
  
There’s no question whether he recognizes the looseness of her tongue; they never talk about this.  
  
“No,” he answers honestly. “Not completely. But there are other ways to cope. And eventually you can make it numb, if that’s any better for you.”  
  
“With this,” Katniss snorts, brandishing the liquor. “That’s how you do it.”  
  
“That’s how I do it.”  
  
“I hate it, it’s disgusting,” she declares, pulling another mouthful from the glass rim.  
  
“Is that why you’ve nearly downed half of the bottle? I’ll go broke at this rate, drinking for two. I don’t know why I let you have any.”  
  
“Because I’m your favorite.” Katniss blurts it out, isn’t sure whether it’s supposed to be joking or if there’s really truth there, deep under. Haymitch rolls his eyes. “Everything is changing, isn’t it?”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
  
“No more Peacekeepers,” she elaborates carefully, swinging the bottle around again, like the extra hand gesture is necessary to illustrate the drama of her point. “It’s all different. I don’t need to hunt anymore; I don’t know what to do with myself. No cameras lurking around. Before, it was all so… simple. Even when it didn’t feel that way. It’s worse now.”  
  
“You’re a rather thoughtful drunk, when you aren’t angry,” he muses.  
  
Katniss scowls. “Fine, you want me to be angry?”  
  
Haymitch waves his hands to show his surrender but offers nothing in retaliation.  
  
She goes back to stormy silence, then, her hands wrapped around the cool bottle. She doesn’t depend on liquor the way he does, but she knows she’s still desperate to find a way out. Just like he said. And the solution hasn’t yet presented itself.  
  
By four in the morning, Haymitch is slumped over the couch in the living room, his feet propped up on the low table, dozing, looking a wreck. It’s a pitiful sight. She’s never stayed this late before, but he’s not conscious enough to tell her to leave, and the room is still spinning so she can’t be bothered to find the door.  
  
Katniss begins missing Peeta more desperately than ever. Missing his smiles, his eyes, his words, his calm. Fearing the madness, the darkness that haunts the corners of her memory, Katniss crosses the room and rudely kicks the side of the sofa. “Haymitch.”  
  
He grunts something in his sleep, head lolling to the other side.  
  
She kicks it again, then bends her knee to set it on the arm of the couch, weight balanced there. She glares hard, even if he can’t see it. It offers some small comfort, somehow.  
  
Lightheaded and lost, desperate for a reaction, for _attention_ , for Peeta’s adoration, for Gale’s quiet understanding, for Prim’s happiness—there’s no one else, no one else in this whole world left but them, drowning to death in their sadness—Katniss’ closes her eyes. Then she leans over and fumbles at the last second, losing her perch, falling forward with nothing to catch her but Haymitch.  
  
Her hands brace on his upper arms, gripping to keep herself elevated. The rest is easy.  
  
When she kisses him, she doesn’t find Peeta, or Gale, or Prim—nothing calm, or wild, or sweet—just the stale taste of alcohol on rough lips and the uncomfortable scrape of stubble on her chin. His hair is greasy, stringy when her hands find it, fumbling for some kind of purchase and she’s out of her mind but she doesn’t really _care_ , so devoured by her loneliness.  
  
The pressure startles Haymitch from his slumber, of course, eyes blown wide and mouth opening to allow a curse. Her fingers grip hard enough to turn her knuckles white and her tongue tastes the line of his teeth, slick and cool. It lasts seconds before he shoves her off with such strength Katniss lands on the ground, yelping in pain. Haymitch is all movement when he stands, stumbling, disrupting the sofa so that it skids back a few inches. She stays where she is.  
  
“You’re drunk,” he announces in a loud voice, almost offering himself the answer. Haymitch makes a destructive path to the kitchen, knife in hand (she’s surprised he hadn’t stabbed her), and then through it to the stairs. “Go home.”  
  
It’s a growl, but she doesn’t do it. Instead Katniss crawls onto the couch and passes out, woken only hours later by the burning sensation of the alcohol making its reappearance. Haymitch is nowhere to be seen. When she finally does zigzag outside and across the lawn, the sun’s begun its skyward climb and she can’t see through her tears.  
  
But he’s right. The world stops spinning.

 

 

  
She spends weeks inside after that. Grief never abating, never fading. She hates it, hates every day, hates waking up, hates being alive, hates sleeping when her dreams give her no relief. It’s all continuous feedback of white noise. Misery and loss. It’ll never go away, yet she no longer has the courage to take her own life.  
  
Living is only a long, gray period of existence for Katniss Everdeen, girl (no longer) on fire, the Mockingjay. She’s burned up.  
  
Greasy Sae tries to intervene sometimes, but makes no impact. She knows there used to be a doctor overlooking her recovery, but she doesn’t know what happened with that, whether they all gave up simultaneously and left her alone. Her mother calls sometimes. Katniss answers it in a dead silence, and when her mother begins to cry she hangs up to cry by herself.  
  
She remembers Hazelle calling, once. She knows about it because of overhearing Greasy Sae in the kitchen. All in all, it was a short conversation in low tones that ended with “I’m sorry” and a click of the dial tone.  
  
One late night Greasy Sae coaxes her into the bath and then lets her have her privacy, retreating downstairs. Katniss stares at the glassy surface of the water, soon muddled with dead skin and dirt, and eases down. Her shoulders press against the cool embankment of the tub, eyes on her disfigured body, patches of burnt scars. All at once memories of bathing her younger sister come to mind—laughing, splashing, soap suds swirling, brighter days even amidst starvation and poverty.  
  
Katniss slips further down and submerges her head underwater, holds herself there.  
  
She stays that way until her lungs begin to ache and hears a commotion downstairs, distorted by the bathwater. She’s about to sit up when something yanks painfully at her scalp and Katniss thrashes, banging her elbows on the tub.  
  
She sucks down air when she emerges and gapes at the sight of Haymitch kneeling on the floor of the bathroom, his fingers tangled in her hair. He doesn’t let go, just gripping her by a fistful of wet brown strands.  
  
“Care to explain why I’ve come to find you drowning in your own bathwater, sweetheart?”  
  
Katniss’ eyes flick to his shoulder, then his mouth, then gives him a murderous look. She’s too outraged for embarrassment. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”  
  
He snorts. “I might believe you, if I didn’t know what I saw from experience.”  
  
“I wasn’t.” Katniss yanks out of his grip and lunges from the bath to wrap a towel around her body, sloshing water everywhere. “You wouldn’t care even if I was. Leave me alone, Haymitch.”  
  
He exits without another word. Yet Katniss finds him downstairs after she’s dressed, hair a damp mess over her shoulders, untouched by a comb. Her scalp is still sore.  
  
“Where’s Greasy Sae?”  
  
“Sent her off,” he says easily. “You should be paying her for all the trouble she puts into you every day.”  
  
“I never ask her to come.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
Silent and furious, Katniss stands in the threshold of the room and waits for him to do something. When nothing is forthcoming, she spits out, “Are we going to talk about it?”  
  
“Not if you don’t want to.” Haymitch gives her a long look that seems almost sober. “Katniss, I would give my own life if it meant Peeta could have survived.” The words are sudden and feel like a kick to the gut. She stares at him wide-eyed, uncomprehending, waiting for him to go on. When he doesn’t, just peels the top off a bottle of liquor from the table, she crosses the room and snatches it from him.  
  
“Tell me you mean it.”  
  
She’s close, near his eyes, the gray color matched against her own in mirror image. Different from the reflective blue of Peeta and Prim, a promise of spring, of new days and clear skies. Yet same as Gale’s, like coal, like suffering, though they all suffer in the end.  
  
“I mean it, Katniss.” His voice has lowered, a strong baritone that shows real aching she’s not sure she’s ever witnessed before. “I made you a promise, or don’t you remember? I said it was Peeta who would make it out alive this time, and I swore on that. But, you should know, I’m never very good at protecting the people who mean something. And this time was no different.”  
  
Katniss is shaking when he’s done. She tips the bottle up and knocks back the bitter, burning liquor herself, on her own, because isn’t that true. Isn’t that how it is. Haymitch, whose _everyone_ died because of his simple action of winning the Games. And for her, because of winning the Games, Katniss has killed everyone she loved, everyone who meant something. She’s destroyed lives.  
  
She should have let Thresh, Clove, Cato, _anyone_ kill her in the arena from the very beginning. Or she should have taken care of everyone else, then surrendered herself to the Mutts or to the nightlock and let Peeta have victory.  
  
Then none of this would have happened.  
  
“I don’t want to be you,” she admits, gutturally, the words whispered so quiet they tremble. “I don’t want to live this way. I don’t want to live at all.”  
  
“Peeta always claimed we were alike.” Haymitch’s gaze is steady on her but it isn’t much of a comfort. “You don’t have to be me, Katniss.”  
  
She surrenders the bottle to his hands and says nothing.  
  


 

 

Peeta never goes away during those months. It’s as if he possesses her every thought, from dawn to dusk, a precious ghost she can’t bear to give up. It’s spring now, deep into the season where dandelions populate the roadsides and torrential rains cleanse everything, starting fresh. A man, a stranger, has opened a new bakery with his family. They have daughters. The wife is sweet and demure and passes out free samplings. Across the street, another man she doesn’t know sells goat milk at low prices. A woman with a kind face sells fabrics and ribbons that Katniss has the money to buy but no one to buy them for.  
  
She passes by the glass windows of the bakery’s cake display, but she can’t help thinking none of them are as beautiful as she remembers.  
  
Most of the time, though, Katniss alters her route to avoid these places altogether.  
  
“You’re an idiot,” she says to the grass, staring at a patch of particularly bright yellow flowers. “You said you wouldn’t leave me. You said…”  
  
 _You said a lot of things, Peeta Mellark._  
  
They had talked about it once. About Peeta being the one left alive at the end of the Games, and how he would have nothing worth living for. She thinks it’s ridiculous now, because it doesn’t matter, because he’s _not_ alive, she is, and she doesn’t have anything to live for left. She couldn’t protect any of them. That will never, never change.  
  
She realizes she was in love with him. But it’s too late, with no one to admit the truth to but her own hurting heart.  
  
She sees the dandelions, though there’s only the absence of hope for the future to offer. The only thing she has this time, for sure, is a future at all.

 

  
  
A downpour heralds the beginning of summer that night, keeping Katniss awake. Her hand is fisted under her pillow with the cool pearl at the center of her palm, in her fingers, thumb stroking its smooth shape. Unable to find sleep, she finally ventures from her bed and shoves on a beaten pair of boots, already wearing her clothes from the day before. She pockets the pearl.  
  
The journey to Haymitch’s house is fast, memorized, even in the darkness and rain. She kicks off her boots inside the door (he keeps it unlocked now, she suspects for her own benefit) and peels off the outer layer of her jacket. Heading upstairs in her sodden socks, Katniss can’t describe the blankness of her mind, the clarity of her actions in coming here now, but she no longer wants to be alone in that house across the yard every miserable night after every miserable day.  
  
He’s passed out in bed, which doesn’t surprise her. What surprises her is that he even made it to his bed.  
  
Katniss doesn’t bother to announce her presence, crawling with her wet clothes onto the mattress and curling up at the other end. He rouses at the shifting, glances over, says nothing and just looks at her for a moment. Then he lays his head back down.  
  
They don’t hold each other. They don’t touch at all. The rain keeps up its rhythmic beating on the walls, on the ceiling and the windowpanes, lulling Katniss into a realm of sleep. But she’s calm, hearing the even tempo of Haymitch’s heart inches away.  
  
That night, her mind rewards her with the sweetest dream since she can remember. She is with Prim in an open meadow, gorgeous and sunny, covered in a kaleidoscope of colors. Prim builds a wreath of flowers and sets it on Katniss’ head; Katniss takes it off and places it around Prim’s neck. Prim’s smile stays with her into the warm, waking hours of morning.  
  
Haymitch dresses while Katniss puts on her boots and jacket. They don’t discuss anything, but Haymitch doesn’t touch a bottle before they leave. They walk for a while, until Katniss finds herself in the very meadow she dreamed of the night before. The meadow belonging to the Seam. A place that used to be so different. While they stand there, Haymitch shades his eyes against the sun and looks around like he’s seeing something he’s never seen before.  
  
Quietly, Katniss reaches into her pocket and withdraws the pearl, dragging the heel of her boot across the dirt to create a groove. She places the pearl there, then covers it up, patting the cool black earth already dry from last night’s storm. It doesn’t take long to scatter the flowers on top. She thinks of singing, but she has no voice for it.  
  
“What now, girl on fire?” Haymitch’s eyes fall on her, unquestioningly sober.  
  
“I don’t know,” she admits. Defeated. “I guess I’ll figure it out.”  
  
“It’ll get easier.”  
  
“Maybe.” Katniss stares at her feet for a long time. She knows he’s trying to say something, but of course he doesn’t say it, can’t, and that’s fine. For once, that’s fine.  
  
They walk back together, and Haymitch places his arm around her shoulders, leading her home, letting the silence settle at last.


End file.
